SUMMARY

Life before the internet revolution

Are we becoming a different type of people? How much different are people who grew up with the internet than those who have only been using it for half of their lives?

The “point of no return” seems to be around 1999. The people who did the majority of their intellectual development before that date are fundamentally different than their younger peers. Before 1999, we had a non-internet, very hierarchical type of world marked by the cold war, whereas from 1999 onwards we build an internet-based, collaborative, networked, non-hierarchical world.

Obviously there are always socio-political differences and ways of thinking between each generation, but the question here is whether the Internet has really created deeper changes than what the TV, radio, telephone or print did in their time.


Redefining knowledge & new functions of the human brain

If the Internet has changed one thing, it’s engineered our newfound stupidity as we don’t have to remember facts anymore. Is memorizing huge amount of information about general culture, events and historical dates that important? Essentially, the technology changes the way we memorize and process information. That’s where the internet makes it very important for us to create a distinction between: Information, knowledge, understanding, experience, feeling etc...

Undoubtedly, we access to an infinitely larger amount of information than we ever did before. Turning that information into knowledge is a process, to a large extent it’s a process you go through with other people. We go through this process by discussing it in real life, online or reading other people’s discussions. That’s a process that we’re relearning and the fact that all of us have a much wider set of knowledge and understanding now also leads us to have opinions about thousands of different topics we wouldn’t know about or care about without the internet. On the other hand it also means that we’re often only picking up small bits of information here and there and that our understanding of things will lack a certain depth if the process hasn’t been “completed” via sufficient research and discussion.

The massive amount of information we ingest every day for years and years - even if it’s only “shallow knowledge” about every little thing - has the potential to help us create a new type of understanding about our world. In many ways information has become ambient, we’re just existing within a cloud of information that surrounds us and that we can interact with at any moment.


Internet and other media revolutions

The Internet and related digital technologies such as smartphones allow you to access all the information on the planet, locate you in the universe within 3 inches and allow you to publish to (potentially) billions of people and – if you know the number – have a conversation with about four billion people. Impressive?

Think about the impact of books then. For the first time in human history, you didn’t need to remember everything you ever wanted to know anymore. No need for oral traditions to pass on knowledge, songs or stories to remember information essential to your survival (e.g. pharmacology) or that of your own culture.

But when you think about it the biggest change has most likely been the sheer speed of at which the technology spread throughout the planet. Print took a few thousands of years to become commonly used worldwide, the radio then TV took a few decades, and so on. With every new technological leap, it’s as if time becomes compressed on an unprecedented scale.